Shirly Hook

Shirly Hook grew up on West Hill in Chelsea, Vermont, where most of the stories in My Bring Up took place. She has never lost her sense of adventure or her sense of humor. She and her family still live in her beautiful state of Vermont. Shirly is a citizen of the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, and she serves on the Council of Chiefs.

My Bring Up

As a kid, Shirly Hook learned how to lasso a rooster, ride a heifer, and turn a steamer trunk into a toboggan. She made friends with a bat. She earned 25 cents an hour hanging wallpaper, saved up for a secondhand bicycle, and was riding it through the woods one day when she got between a panther and its dinner. "A lot of families were really poor, and they had to have an imagination to go along with it," she writes in "My Bring Up," her collection of stories about growing up in rural Vermont in the fifties and sixties. A citizen of the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, Shirly tells about the traditions that helped her family put food on the table, the legacy of the eugenics program in Vermont, and the ties of love and respect that bind neighbor to neighbor. Her collection of twenty stories is a Vermont treasure. (Order Shirly's book from Lulu.com)

Little Deer and the Sacred Corn

Little Deer is an Abenaki girl with a big responsibility. As keeper of the sacred corn, she tends the cornfield that provides her people with food through the long winter. One morning, she awakens to discover that thieves have plundered the field, stealing every last kernel of the sacred corn. Thus begins a time of scarcity and deprivation. When hunger forces her people to leave their homeland, Little Deer decides it is time to act. She sets off on a long journey, alone, to find the sacred corn and bring it home.